It’s August 2026, so I’ve been running Headwall Hosting for around six and a half years now. Energy responsibility has been part of the foundation since the start.
Website hosting uses data centres, and data centres get a lot of bad press these days for their energy consumption. I’d argue consumption isn’t really the problem: efficiency and responsibility are. It’s not whether you use electricity, it’s how you source it.
In a market economy, we can reduce demand for goods and services that pollute, and increase demand for the ones that don’t. I’m a small player in the grand scheme of things: I don’t own a data centre. I lease servers from bigger companies that do, or that have a large presence in one. So the thing I can actually control is who I lease from.
At present I use two upstream suppliers:
- Krystal Hosting: renowned for their environmental awareness, and I’ve used them since the start.
- server.net: a UK-based provider with hardware in Telehouse Docklands London, running on 100% renewable electricity.
Worth saying: Headwall Hosting is not rebadged reseller hosting. I don’t resell packages from these suppliers, I lease raw servers and run our own software stack on them.
Green hosting? Prove it.
It’s not enough to just say “we’re powered by renewables”. Said on its own, that’s greenwashing. So I’ve signed up with the Green Web Foundation to make sure the claim is evidence-backed rather than a badge I’ve bolted onto the footer.
It’s a bit of an administrative faff, chasing down the actual certificates and other evidence from suppliers. But I think it’s worth a few days of office admin a year to keep it current. You can check it yourself here:
Tip: Already hosted with Headwall Hosting? Search Green Web Foundation for your own website, then grab the badge and add it to your website to show off your green credentials.
Why bother
None of this is a badge for its own sake. Cheap hosting that doesn’t mention its energy source usually isn’t hiding a good answer. Verification means a claim like “we’re hosted green” has something behind it if anyone, client or otherwise, ever asks me to prove it.
It also isn’t the whole picture. Where your server sits is one half of a website’s carbon footprint. The other half is how much work that server has to do, and how much data it has to push down the wire for every visitor. That’s a separate job: I’ve got a client at the moment trying to improve their score on a website carbon calculator, and it’s given me enough to write up properly. So next time, I’ll cover the technical side: measuring a site’s footprint and the concrete changes that bring the number down.